Canon Fodder #3: Icing Sugar

The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

Like Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, this was a CD I could never fully adore as a kid despite the considerable number of anthems on it. Yeah, yeah, “Teenage Riot,” “Just Like Heaven,” “Cross The Breeze,” “Why Can’t I Be You," I know. But they were slogs! It might sound weird to prune a single CD to a shorter CD-R and then sell the album back, but that’s the kind of cool cat I was in the aughts, giddy to be able to force my A&R sensibilities on the artists I enjoyed. While I still like playing God with playlists, my taste in physical media evolved into a desire for artwork and a mix of vinyl LPs and compact discs, the format depending on price and album length. It's from this persective that a lightbulb went off: these two weren’t supposed to be CDs in the first place! They’re double albums! And paced as such! (The Cure's Disintegration, on the other hand, is meant to be a CD, those two once-“bonus” tracks creating a thin, three-songs-a-side 2LP situation I won’t tolerate).

I already confirmed the hunch re Daydream earlier this pandemic, and I’m happy to report it holds for Kiss Me as well. The churn and clang of miserable guitar songs and frothy synth celebrations is just dandy with a little breather every 18 minutes or so. It’s easier for me to appreciate the virtues of a sax showcase like “Icing Sugar” as the opener of Side D, no longer grumbling that we’re a goddamn hour into this thing and I just sat through “Like Cockatoos.” I’m also hyper-aware now of what a relentless motherfucker Boris Williams was on the drums, every sob and sonic indulgence from Robert Smith forced to meet his merciless tempo. This kaleidoscopic onslaught might be Boris' finest hour with them.

Teenage Fanclub - Howdy!

When this album first arrived at ye olde record shop in late 2000, three years after their UK chart breakthrough Songs From Northern Britain, everything about it suggested Teenage Fanclub were dunzo. Truly half-assed, cheeseball cover art and title. The opening songs were named “I Need Direction” and “I Can’t Find My Way Home," and I would have believed they were outtakes from the last album. Columbia didn’t even bother releasing Howdy! stateside, handing it over to Thirsty Ear. TF had their ups and downs in the past - SPIN giving them Album Of The Year in 1991 and a 4/10 review in 1995 - but I had to assume Scotland’s finest alterna-Byrds were now bound to jangle and harmonize between seaside photo shoots until it wasn’t worth bothering.

As a young college student, I was embarrassed for them, ambling around irrelevantly in their jackets on those rocks. More than twenty years later, I wish I could go there. While Howdy! might lack a song as striking as “The Concept” or “Ain’t That Enough,” it’s consistently shimmering and hardly inert, arguably their best album between the wry bombast of the SPIN-swooning Bandwagonesque and the late triumph of 2010’s Shadows. However adrift or anxious they felt career-wise, the music betrays none of their earlier yocky genre confusion, new keyboardist Finlay McDonald subtly broadening their palette. One might not even think to giggle at the harmonica solo. In hindsight, this was where they learned the real moneybag was the lovely music they made along the way.

New Order - Technique

Technique, like Depeche Mode’s Music For The Masses, is a Very Big College Rock Album that had the personal misfortune of coming out after the band’s early hits compilation and right before I was listening to College Rock myself. So while most peers slightly older than myself adore it, I always heard More New Order neither Classic nor Modern, no individual track able to rise from that uncanny valley like Depeche’s “Never Let Me Down Again” did. What’s changed is how eager I am for More New Order of this vintage. I may never savor specific notes of Ibiza like Gen X sonic sommeliers do, but I can still get buzzed on the Barney/Hooky interplay and bubbly post-disco thump, just as I do with every other 80s album of theirs.

Teenage Fanclub - Grand Prix

This is the album SPIN took a dump on, writer Jason Cohen immediately announcing shame that they’d championed these mere janglemeisters over the decade-defining Nirvana (My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless got a YELLOW LIGHT in the reviews section that month). The lyrics were bubblegum, the titles included such puns as “Neil Jung” and “Mellow Doubt.” It was all shiny guitars stomps and harmonies and SO WHAT?! “Unlike haggis, the Fannies have no guts, and little relevance either.”

Relevance no longer an issue for anyone stateside who knows Teenage Fanclub, Grand Prix is now mostly recalled as a real uptick from the blasé meta of 1993’s Thirteen (glumly featuring "Commerical Alternative" and "120 Mins"). They always loved this album overseas, UK mags regularly putting it in Best British Albums Ever lists. After all, it’s the one where Teenage Fanclub stopped trying to impress America, guitar tones turning more Creation than DGC. I'm sure it made a solid soundtrack for the summer between Definitely Maybe and What’s The Story (Morning Glory)? Even lacking that cultural context, I still hear a dang good album of shiny guitar stomps, bubblegum harmonies and so what.

Girls Against Boys - Cruise Yourself

The back half falls off hard enough ("My Martini"!) that I can’t recommend 1994's Cruise Yourself the way I do the albums that bracket it, 1993's Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby and 1996's House Of GVSB. But I had to have that front half on my shelf, where former DC hardcore boys somehow turn Wire’s “A Series Of Snakes” into a sexy show-opener, Scott McCloud growling “is everybody tucked in? Is everybody tucked in?” before taking the hammering post-punk aesthetic of Touch & Go “way into the trance thing, way into the trance thing.” I can only imagine how little sense Girls Against Boys makes to someone who wasn’t there: four handsome guys suggesting Killing Joke crunch and ironic ratpack swagger not only belong together but could soundtrack a hot date, going full Mark E Stud for a song named “Kill The Sexplayer” you might recognize from Clerks. Their dream of divorcing these noises from goth cartoon and antisocial pigfuckery didn’t work out (the major label debut came a little too soft and a little too late), but if you have time for nicotine screams of “you know what I like!” over distorted keyboard and a thunderous rhythm section, they come on like gangbusters here, and go out on a lovely bit of faux-vibraphone called “Glazed-Eye.” Commercial alternative, baby!